Once you have decided that deploying a paycard program within your organization is the right choice for your employer and workforce, one of the most important activities that you will need to engage in to make your paycard program a success will be the active promotion of your program to the specific employees who are the intended users of the cards. Without a clear strategy on how you will achieve high levels of participation in your paycard program, you may not reach the participation rate that you have set as your goal.
In the case of paycards, your target employee population will likely be those individuals who do not have access to a traditional bank account and have little or no experience with financial institutions. They probably have limited, if any, experience with using ATMs or getting cash back at point-of-sale terminals in retail stores. Your payroll card communications must effectively educate these employees as to why a payroll card is better than a paper paycheck. Some examples of things they can do that they weren't able to do with a paycheck include:
Even though employers throughout the country have achieved approximately a 65% participation rate for direct deposit over the past 25 years, this success took a great deal of time and continual educational outreach by employers and financial institutions to the U.S. workforce. Fortunately, the promotion of paycards to your workforce should be easier in some respects than direct deposit as you are not reliant on the employee to provide accurate bank account information (a major employee participation obstacle). Instead, your employer will establish a bank account through the payroll program provider where wage payments can be electronically sent and accessed by workers using the cards.
When promoting paycards to your workforce, be sure that your communications highlight the following benefits that your employees can expect by participating in your paycard program:
Before embarking on the implementation and promotion of your paycard program to your workforce, it is critical that you, your other payroll department team members, the human resources department, and senior management fully understand and support this endeavor. Without the unconditional buy-in and support for your program from these key areas of your organization, you will not achieve your program goals. Your workforce will quickly notice if any of these internal stakeholders do not know about your program, are not in agreement with it, or are not showing enthusiasm about its deployment. By getting everyone on-board with you about the benefits and value that the program will bring your organization, you will be able to achieve a unified approach to gain acceptance of the program from your employees.
In addition, by involving these other areas of your organization in the promotion of your paycard program, you may also achieve the benefit of obtaining additional feedback from them about how to make the program a true success. These various areas of your organization may be able to provide you with direct knowledge or impressions about how your employees may initially react to your future paycard campaign, including potential pitfalls to avoid. And the development and promotion of the program may dovetail with other organizational initiatives that may be pending that you may not be aware of, thus benefiting multiple organizational goals and objectives.
If your organization has an internal corporate communications and/or marketing department, consider seeking their guidance and help with the promotion of your paycard program to your employees. Your human resources department and senior management team should be able to secure the assistance that you may need from your corporate communications/marketing department, as they likely have more regular contact with these departments on other matters.
When launching a paycard program for your unbanked workers, you will have to decide how your employer will structure the bank account(s) for the program. Some employers may choose to have their employees' debit cards set up so there is a one-employee-to-one-account relationship. Others may opt for an aggregate or master bank account with sub-accounts established for each employee that are systemically accounted for individually, even though wages of all employees are essentially commingled. You should consult with your payroll card program provider on the options that they have available.
From an employer's perspective, the use of an aggregate/master account for a paycard program will likely cut down on administrative costs as all wages paid to employees using the cards will be sent via one ACH transaction as opposed to multiple transactions with a potential transactional fee associated to each account for each pay period.
After obtaining support from your human resources department and senior management, you will then need to devise an actual promotion campaign to encourage the high rates of participation that will help you achieve your goal. To achieve this, seek help from your corporate communications, marketing, and/or public relations departments. Your program provider will also have materials that you can use to promote your program such as brochures, posters, tent cards for breakrooms, pay statement inserts, videos, etc.
If your targeted employee base for your payroll card program speaks English as a second language, your promotional program will have greater success if it is communicated to employees in the language that they best understand.
Once you have all the promotional materials ready to go, consider launching your program during direct deposit month or during a pre-planned company event where there will be a lot of employee participation and presence. And of course, add these promotional materials to your other new hire documents and within any established new hire process.
Overcoming language barriers could be one of the best ways to increase participation. As well, it would be prudent for employers to also do a little research on your employees' attitudes toward traditional banking. In some cases, employers may find that some of their workers who were born and raised outside of the U.S. have a more skeptical view of the banking world. Understanding these cultural perceptions associated with financial institutions will help you tailor the appropriate promotional message to your workforce.
At organizations with employees represented by a union, the terms of employment for those employees are governed by a collective bargaining agreement. This contract most likely governs how union employees are to be paid, including the method of payment. Introducing paycards to this population will have to be bargained with the union before the program can be implemented. Be proactive and set up a meeting with union leaders to educate them on how the paycard program will benefit the workers that they represent. Including them early on in the decision making process will decrease the likelihood of an adversarial or skeptical reaction to paycards and make bargaining over the issue that much easier.
Since your organization will be partnering with a bank, payroll service provider, and/or payroll card vendor to help you create and launch your payroll card program, why not leverage their previous experience with other payroll card customers to help you develop a promotional plan that will work for your organization? Whoever your program partner may be, it is also in their best interest that your organization succeeds in rolling out payroll cards to your workforce. In fact, once you choose a program partner, you should include a representative from their organization to participate in your internal payroll card promotion discussions and meetings.
Source: American Payroll Association/ Visa Paycard Portal 2009
